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Well, look on the bright side: no one will have to worry about those Facebook timelines. With any luck there is a test tube somewhere ensuring we'll all be dead before the IPO when they'll actually raise the money to debug that shit.

This isn't particularly new for the human race. Look at MAD, for example(which is still fairly real - We still do have enough nukes to wipe out all life on the planet fairly effectively). One person, with their finger on the trigger, could slip up and 'accidentally' push the button, and cause not only the death of Humans, but also others. I'm sure there are other examples of humans having a large amount of control over the advancement of the human race, but that's the one that popped into mind. As we grow, and advance technologically, we'll keep developing even better ways of effectively causing ourselves/other species to become extinct. We're a violent race, when you think about it. While I don't like it, I'm just trying to be realistic as far as looking at humanities tendencies.

Crap. We never had enough nukes to "wipe out all life on the planet fairly effectively". In fact I very much doubt that we ever had enough nukes to do any more than set back human civilization more than a century or so.

Just give a citation instead of this alarmist crap. You probably also think CO2 will "end civilization" which i would look up except you hide behind the "anonymous coward" nom de plume.

Apparently not. [informatio...utiful.net] Of course, that link ignores nuclear winter [wikipedia.org], which would do sufficient damage to Earth's ecosystem to most likely wipe out humanity along with most other species, although some very radiation-hardened otherwise hardy life would probably survive.

My generation was brought up with the common knowledge that there were enough nukes to destroy all life on the planet many times over, and that the radiation of a nuclear blast would make a spot uninhabitable for thousands of years.

I remember how shocked and surprised I was as a teenager (don't laugh, there were no discovery channel, google or wikipedia) when I learned that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki are abandoned lifeless nuclear wasteland

Actually nuclear winter is far from proven. Your own wiki link talks about all the conflicting computer models. One computer model assumption would result in a nuclear winter. Another would result in only very temporary local cooling only at the bomb sites. The actual bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as evidence from nuclear tests seem to indicate that the climate effects would not be so severe.

With enough ICBMs you could target every major city in the world and reduce the earth's population by 80

The missiles are aimed at something. There won't be time to re-aim them between hostile launch and loss of your missiles.

So, while the USA and Russia might be able to ruin each other, and France and the UK can each pick out a country at random to nuke if they desire, the majority of the world will read about it in the paper the next day.

So, while the USA and Russia might be able to ruin each other, and France and the UK can each pick out a country at random to nuke if they desire, the majority of the world will read about it in the paper the next day.

Or read it real time on Twitter....

A localized nuclear exchange of sufficient yield would most likely have a severe impact on the remaining global population.

Nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas in a fight between India and Pakistan would start firestorms that would put massive amounts of smoke into the upper atmosphere.

The particles would remain there for years, blocking the sun, making the earth’s surface cold, dark and dry. Agricultural collapse and mass starvation could follow. Hence, global cooling could result from a regional war, not just a conflict between the U.S. and Russia.

Cooling scenarios are based on computer models. But observations of volcanic eruptions, forest fire smoke and other phenomena provide confidence that the models are correct.

The problem with the "enough nukes to end all life on earth" argument is than it assumes we set out to carpet-bomb the planet, which is almost certainly not what would happen. The actual plan would be to simultaneously fire enough nukes at each important target to vaporize it several times over in the hopes that enough missiles would get past your enemy's defenses to at least cripple it. The worst-case scenario would be both sides defenses crumble under the onslaught and the targets (at a guess? all major

Biologists have always been risking our extinction. I mean, the Cuban Sniffle Crisis? Hello? Didn't we learn ANYTHING from that?

I'm sorry, what's that? Cuban MISSILE crisis? Humanity has been flirting with it's own extinction through science for quite a while now? We still have enough nukes to destroy the world several times over, and this virus hasn't even been created yet?

Well, I mean, still, DEADLY DISEASES, we've never played around with that before, that's unique! What are we thinking?

And a naturally-occurring disease like Ebola could get into a major international airport and have much the same effect?

We now have a pretty effective Ebola vaccine [sciencedaily.com] and even before the vaccine the virus just wasn't all that contagious. People sick with the disease have traveled in crowded cities and crowded aircraft without a single recorded case of transmission.

Ebola is a very nasty disease if you haven't had the vaccine and certain varieties have very high mortality rates, but all of the outbreaks have been self-limiting and there haven't been any confirmed cases of airborne transmission of any of the strains that affect h

Yeah, that's what biologist spend their time on. Trying to figure out how to make bug deadlier to humans. I suggest we get rid of them scientist and go back to the good old small pox/black death/polyo days.

Easy enough if there's no ferrets around, but if there are all it takes if one ferret-cough to send the virus airborne, and then good luck dodging it.

And the fact that human influenza can jump the species gap is all it needs to be scary, even if the human-fatal ferret flu couldn't. Viruses are way better at sexual reproduction (i.e. recombinant DNA exchange) than anything else on the planet, and influenza has a reputation as one of the more "adventurous" strains. If two or more compatible viruses happen t

You will be wasting your time, unless you also know how to make it resistant to current vaccines and neuraminidase inhibitors:

To assess whether current control measures may be effective against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus, we examined the reactivity of sera from individuals vaccinated with an H5N1 prototype vaccine38 against a virus possessing the N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I mutations in HA. We found that pooled human sera from individuals immunized with this vaccine reacted with the virus possessing the mutant H5 HA (N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I) at a higher titre than with a wild-type H5 HA virus (VN1203/PR8; Supplementary Table 6), indicating that current H5N1 vaccines would be efficacious against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus. In addition, the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus (HA(N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I)/CA04) was highly susceptible to a licensed NA inhibitor, oseltamivir (Supplementary Table 7). These experiments show that appropriate control measures would be available to combat the transmissible virus described in this study.

What nobody seems to get is that by suppressing research into viruses and how they spread guarantees that MomNature, when she comes up with one, will make a virus to kill us all while we are standing around unprepared.

Far too many people have bought into the War on Terror horseshit. There is nothing new here unless you have never in your life visited a scientific library. The stacks are full of the vast body of science, centuries of it. An enormous fraction of can be used for mischief by those who are skilled in the relevant arts. This paper breaks no new ground in that regard, hysterical public hype notwithstanding.

Beware of assuming that pundits or authorities are generally correct or that they have your best interests

Nice troll there. Sorry to the community that I'm feeding you, but I can't just sit there seeing your comment at +2 without pointing a few things out.

I'm an atheist, but I think I wouldn't be if I were born in a Muslim country. There are places in the world where if you're not a Muslim (or a Catholic, etc.) you're a social pariah. Many people have to at least pay lip service to a creed, and even if they would rather become atheist given the freedom of choice, they're not going to alienate themselves from

As an individual, you want to be judged by your actions as an individual. Please extend the same courtesy to Muslims individually, which means refraining from labeling them collectively as aggressive nut cases bent on world destruction.

But as an individual I also want to be lazy and take easy mental shortcuts to understanding complex situations. How can I do both?!

The sacred text of Christianity is the new testament, which is about the life of Jesus told by his disciples. The sacred text of the Muslims is the Koran (which are Mahommed's recitals of what God said to him in the desert). In addition to the Koran there are books written about Mahommed's life, and Mahommed's did a lot of contentious things (like committing genocide against a Jewish tribe in Medina, or taking a tithe from terrorism, or dealing in slaves).